


Compurgation (Revelations & Confessions)

by geniewithwifi



Series: Hero Quintessence [9]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Angst, Confessions, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Kapiushon, Secrets, episode reaction fic, post 5x17
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-23
Updated: 2017-03-23
Packaged: 2018-10-09 18:28:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10418424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/geniewithwifi/pseuds/geniewithwifi
Summary: Oliver and Felicity have a heart to heart after the events of 5x17. Secrets are revealed and confessions are absolved.Posted on tumblr under the title Revelations & Confessions





	

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for Season 5, episode 17
> 
> Set sometime after 5x17.

(Set somewhere post 5x17)

Oliver sat on the cot in front of her, arms supporting his weight on his knees, head hung low. He knew she was there, he always did. Still, he refused to look up at her, to meet her gaze.

It had been this way for weeks. He’d shut himself off, emotionally, physically, much more that he had ever done before, in the times she’d known him. Then, he would always glance up, make sure that she knew that she mattered to him, in some small way.

Now, he stiller than a statue, frozen in misery.

“Oliver.” Felicity whispered, stepping towards him. Still he refused to move. 

Cautiously, she approached him, her heels sounding a knell with each stiletto strike. As though every step was another scar on his skin. She settled on the floor in front of him, kneeling at his feet. This way, she could peer up at him, find his eyes and see what he was thinking.

If she knew what the wound was, she could heal him. It was deep, and unseen, but had broken Oliver to the point that he didn’t spring back by his own power or the encouragement of her or John.

Still, he didn’t move. He gave the illusion that she wasn’t really there, that perhaps she was an illusion of his mind. An echo of his mistakes.

Felicity reached out and grasped his hands, his fingers between her palms. They were cold, dry and brittle, smooth as a stone. Ridges of calluses mapped a pattern of hardship and toil, orators of his heroic acts. The same scars that revealed the instrument of darkness he held tightly to.

The instant her hands made contact with his, he shuddered, pulling away. Quickly, she reclaimed her grip.

“Don’t.” He whispered, voice hoarse from disuse. 

Felicity ignored him, readjusting her grasp, and bringing his hands to her lips. Reverently, she caressed each knuckle, every ridge and valley. Her lips pressed with care to those battered hands.

“Felicity, stop.” She looked up and for the first time since she’d entered this room, he looked her in the eyes. 

“Why should I?” He needed help. He needed _her_ help, and she wanted to finally stop denying both of them proper healing.

“I– I don’t… just stop. Leave me alone.” 

“No” She brought his hands down, cradling them against her chest. “Let me help you. Tell me what Prometheus did to you so that I can fix this, so I can fix you.” 

That hardened his gaze, just like she knew he would. Better to have him angry than despondent.

“I don’t need fixing. Not everything can be fixed, Felicity, as you very well know. Death cannot be fixed. I cannot be fixed.” His ire vanished as fast as it had appeared. He adverted his eyes from her once again. “ _We_ cannot be fixed.” 

She let her fingers run through his hair, an intrinsic action born of their time together. A soothing motion that brought him a semblance of peace whenever he got lost in his head, when his demons cried too loud for her to shut them out.

“No, people cannot be fixed, you’re right. But we can be encouraged, hopeful. We can change if we have the desire to do so. Most of all, we love despite faults and failings, and that love heals.  And I know you Oliver Queen. You love and forgive people so much that you believe you can heal them just by loving them.”

“I don’t–”

A hand moved to cup his face, her thumb softly silencing him.

“And let me tell you, Oliver, your love has done just that. Your love, your forgiveness to those that have hurt you heals them. So for once, let someone heal you.” 

Oliver jerked back, effectively removing her hand from his cheek.

“You’re wrong Felicity. You couldn’t be more wrong. I don’t love people- I hurt them. I love them and they end up dead or tainted by the darkness within me. Adrian said—”

Oliver physically bit down on his tongue, shutting her out. And with three sentences, he’d revealed where he was hurting most. The place she needed to examine closer, to perform surgery so that Oliver would heal and be the hero she knew he was.

“What did he tell you?”

“No. No. “ He stood up, turning away from her.

“Oliver.” Damn the stubborn bastard.

“No, Felicity. Leave me alone.”

“No Oliver., I won’t.” She got to her feet, marching after his retreating form. She grabbed his arm to pull him around. He let her, she knew, because he could’ve resisted if he wanted to. Felicity didn’t have the strength to physically force Oliver to do something he didn’t want. 

She compelled him to meet her eyes. “If you remember, you promised me, over a year ago, that _you would never lie to me again.”_

He flinched.

“And what are you doing now? Lying.”

“But–” She raised her hand, cutting off his protests. 

“A lie of omission is still a lie. Just because it doesn’t feel like you’re not telling the truth, doesn’t actually mean that you are.”

A fierce look came over him, his lips tightening to a white line.

“You’re one to talk, Felicity. You’re still lying to me! You asked me to trust you and I did, but you don’t get to pull this card with me for doing the same thing!”

He huffed, taking a deep breath and letting it out. “I just thought we promised to not lie to each other.”

“You, and you alone,” she poked his chest with every utterance of the word ‘you’, “made that promise, Oliver. I never said I would never lie to you.” 

“Oh, so it’s okay for you to lie, but to condemn me for doing the same thing? To break off our relationship because of something I did, and then turn around and do likewise? If you consider me a hypocrite right now, Felicity, then take a look in the mirror. You might not like what you see.” 

“Fine! I’ll tell you what you want to know.” Felicity turned away from him, cutting of the tension brewing between them. She collapsed on the cot. All her anger and frustration faded away, leaving her feeling hollow.

Oliver, unbidden, followed suit, sitting next to her, leaving a small gap between them.

“When I was trying to free John from prison, I stumbled across another hacker, one who recognized me as my old handle from college. From my hackivist days.”

This was harder than she thought it was going to be, but in a way, it felt freeing to tell Oliver this. He wouldn’t condemn her for this. She hoped.

“Long story short she gave me information, a cache called Pandora, that she and her team had collected throughout the years. With this information, I could help the team better. I got John exonerated, I found the nukes in Russia, I found Amanda Westfield.”

Oliver almost smiled, a hint of wistfulness. “So that’s how you did it.”

“Yeah. Well, then Helix started asking me to do things in order to continue helping me. Illegal things. You needed me to find Susan, so I redirected some government drones. Then you went missing and I couldn’t find you…”

“You helped them again.”

“Felicity..”

“I know what you’re going to say. But I made my own choice. It wasn’t you.” 

“You did all that  because I brought you into this life. You’d never need to join Helix if you weren’t part of the team. If I hadn’t _created_ the team.”

“Oliver, this is not your fault. I made this choice. This was my past catching up to me. It couldn’t be your fault because I didn’t know you in MIT. I was the hackavist before you ever were the vigilante of Starling City. The blame rests on me.”

“And now?”

“Now Helix has threatened me that if I don’t hack into ARGUS, that they will expose you as the Green Arrow–and the Arrow and the Hood.”

He reached over and touched her wrist, the first time he’d initiated the contact for the longest time. She’d always made contact with him, not the other way around. It caused butterflied to stir in her stomach.

“Now that I’ve told my secret, it’s time to tell me yours. What did Prometheus tell you?”

He shook his head, letting her go. “It’s not what he said, Felicity. It’s what I confessed.”

She faced him, bringing a leg up on the cot. “What do you mean?”

“He made me confess my darkest secret, Felicity, one that I’ve been hiding from even myself.  He–”

Oliver started shaking his head almost frantically. “He threatened you Felicity” Oliver reached up and touched her glasses. “ Adrian showed me these, he’d snuck into your apartment and taken them while you slept. He could’ve– Then he threaten William, that he’d find him it was only a matter of time.He knew about Shado, about my time in Russia, of course he’d find him. I had to. I had to tell him. He even pretended to kill Evelyn. I couldn’t, I had to tell him Felicity. It was the only way.”

“What did you tell him?”

Oliver was silent, tears slipping down his face.

“Oliver, trust me. Please. I trusted you. Now, you need to trust me.”

“You’ll want nothing to do with me. I’ll lose you, a-and John, a-a-and everyone. You shouldn’t know this, Felicity. You’ll never look at me the same.” 

“Look at me, Oliver. _Look_ at me.” He did so, albeit reluctantly. She took his face firmly in her grasp. This was it. In order to have him face his fears, in order to save him from his own mind, she’d have to give it her all. Every last drop. 

“Nothing, _nothing,_ will ever change the way I see you, Oliver. Nothing. You forget that I’ve known you almost as long as John. I have seen you at your lowest. I saw you after Tommy died. I saw you be mean, and cruel, and uncaring. I watched as you made stupid choice, after selfish choice. None of that changed my feelings.

“In fact, watching you showed me the good inside. The man behind the mask. How deeply you love. How protective you are. The same drive you have to take on other’s sins is the same drive that has you putting on that hood every night. You save people; whether it’s from themselves or from others, that’s what you do. That is who I see when I look at you. I don’t see the Mayor, or the Green Arrow. I don’t see the murderer, or the martyr. I see you, Oliver, and I love that man. Nothing, not your lies, not my insecurities will ever change that. And definitely not this secret.”

She watched as multiple emotions crossed his face: despair, hope, love, self-loathing, awe. He stared into her eyes, letting her past all the barriers. he’d erected over the past ten years.

Then he shut it down. He looked down at the space between them, and with a low voice, afraid of the truth he held inside, carefully, he let the demons out.

“I told him that I didn’t start this to right my father’s wrongs. I did this, I became the hood, so that I could separate the monster from the man. So that I could justify what I was doing as dealing justice. I was telling myself a lie. I did all this, because I wanted to kill. I wanted to kill those men on the list. I wanted to because I enjoyed the feeling it gave me, that of- of power and control. I held people’s lives in the balance and desired to destroy them, as a pleasure. That is my secret. The Hood was an excuse to do what I wanted.” 

He tried to duck his head further, but her grip halted him. Felicity gazed at him, her heart hurting for him, but grateful that he finally trusted her enough. This man, this broken man was finally shattered enough to be remade. To heal the fractured bone that had healed crooked, it must be reset. Deconstructed to be made whole.

He had finally faced the darkness within.

“I know.” 

Oliver stilled beneath her fingers, slowly raising his eyes to hers.

“I know, Oliver. I’ve known this from the day you revealed yourself in the backseat of my car. You killed because you could. Because it was permanent. Once a life was taken, that person would never hurt you or others again. This was why you killed the Count. It was to protect me, but not the way you think. You killed him so that he’d never have the chance to hurt me again. You relish killing because of the _result,_ not the act.”

She moved then, shifting her hands to his shoulders and pulling herself into his lap. Oliver froze, arms stiff at his side. Now, more than ever, she couldn’t reject him. They would never come back from that. Though, it was agony not to have him hold _her._

“You’ve changed since then. Found a better way to achieve that outcome. Until you killed Damian Darhk. Probably when you killed Ra’s. That temptation returned, the satisfaction of destroying your enemies came back. You started killing again. 

“I’m to blame too. I encouraged this. I told you to kill Darhk and Ra’s. I exploited this weakness you have, and used it myself. We all have our demons, Oliver. Yours is this. Mine is information. 

“My point is, we have to come to terms with this temptation. We can’t avoid it. We can’t separate from ourselfs or we just give it strength. I’ve learned this from watching you, but also from my own mistakes. I should never have gotten involved with Helix. It was stupid of me.”

Finally, Oliver found his voice.

“You could never be stupid.” 

She laughed, short and rough. “You might be surprised.”

“I’m serious.” 

“Alright.” 

Oliver snaked his arms around her, pressing her to him. He kissed her head, and that’s when she knew he had heard her, _really_ heard her.

“Thank-you.” He murmured against her hair. 

“I love you.” Was her response. “and we will get through this, Oliver. I have your back. I’ll be your anchor, to pull you back when you go too far. This means, that you have to stop killing. The more you indulge in this behavior, the more it will have a hold of you. You can’t kill Prometheus. I won’t ask you too.” 

It was a long time before Oliver responded.

“Alright.” 

It wasn’t a promise, but it was going forward. He was taking a step in the right direction.

“We’ll get through this. We’ll stop Prometheus.”

“We’ll also figure out how to get you out of this mess with Helix. I promise.” 

She looked up at him, at the face of the man she loved despite his faults. “Together?”

He kissed her then, unexpectedly. He pulled her close, melding her to him. She gave as back as much as she could, expressing her feelings she had for him. He took what she gave, and he returned in kind. Felicity had finally come home after so long being adrift.

Reluctantly, a need for air taking priority, he pulled back. “Together.” he agreed.

**Author's Note:**

> Reviews feed the muse!


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